Engineering Commons^™

Thermophotovoltaic System Efficiency Simulation, Qingshuang Chen, Roman Shugayev, Peter Bermel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) power systems, which convert heat into electricity using a photovoltaic diode to collect thermal radiation, have attracted increasing attention in recent work. It has recently been proposed that new optical structures such as photonic crystals can significantly improve the efficiency of these devices in two ways. First, the electronic bandgap of the TPV diode should match the photonic bandgap of the emitter, in order to ensure that the majority of emitted photons can be converted. Second, a photonic crystal short-pass optical filter can be added to the front of the TPV diode to send long wavelength photons back …